Silicon Valley has spent decades selling the same mythology: the lone visionary with a disruptive idea who survives sleepless nights in a garage before becoming the next Steve Jobs.
But Marin filmmakers Kenji Yamamoto and Nancy Kelly’s documentary, The Dreamers and I, is less interested in startup mythology than the emotional reality beneath it. The film plays this weekend at Larkspur’s Lark Theater.
The Dreamers and I follows immigrant entrepreneurs living in a Silicon Valley hacker house over a 10-year period as they pursue opportunity while confronting uncertainty, financial instability and self-doubt. Yet somewhere during the making of the documentary, Yamamoto realized the story had become something much larger than startups.
“When I started this film 10 years ago, I thought, ‘One of these characters, Carlos, Lucas, Habibe, are going to make it big.’ They were all so talented. And that’s what most documentaries and narratives about entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are about,” says Yamamoto, the film’s director.
At the time, he was also navigating his own uncertainty. Though Yamamoto had spent decades editing films for Apple product launches, this was his first time directing a feature documentary himself.
“I also had a tremendous lack of faith in myself as a filmmaker. I had never directed a film before; Nancy had always been the director, the one who got an idea that turned into one of those films,” he notes. Kelly, director of the award-winning Rebels with a Cause, is also the film’s producer and writer. “I also thought I might be too old. I was 65 when I got the idea that became The Dreamers and I.”
As the years passed, the expected narrative of tech triumph never materialized.
“Late in the project, about year eight of my 10-year journey, I realized that I was not capturing the expected Silicon Valley phenomenon: the story we hear about that always results in the phenomenal heights reached by a singular hero: Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Larry Page,” he admits.
Instead, Yamamoto witnessed repeated setbacks and emotional strain among his subjects.
“What’s more, I realized that each of my characters was going through their own defeats,” he states. “For example, after a devastating failure, Lucas disappeared for 18 months. My own experience as a first-time film director mirrored their lives.”
The parallels between filmmaker and subject became unavoidable. Yamamoto says the decade-long process fundamentally altered his own understanding of ambition and success.
“My relationship with ambition and success changed tremendously during the 10 years I made the film because I had to face my own failures and to take risks that I’d never taken before,” he says.
At one point, he believed the project itself had collapsed.
“I thought my film was dead,” Yamamoto recalls. “But (spoiler alert), after my near-death experience, I gained a new perspective on what was important: What matters in life is what makes me happy, and what made me happy was to tell this story about dreams, about belief in oneself.”
That realization led him to place himself inside the documentary alongside the entrepreneurs he was filming.
“That’s why I added myself to the story, which, at first, seemed like a terrible idea but turned out to be a good one,” he says.
The film also reframes immigration through a deeply personal lens rather than a political one.
“I filmed over 200 hacker house residents, most of whom were immigrants,” Yamamoto notes. “All of them saw opportunity and hope in America. They all come here to invent themselves, which was an emotional thing for me to witness.”
For Kelly, the new work ultimately continues a recurring theme present throughout their body of work.
“In both films, we see that ordinary people with a passion can do extraordinary things,” Kelly says. “We’ve made about 10 films together, and it seems like each of them is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
The ‘Dreamers and I’ screens at 6pm, Friday and Saturday, June 12 and 13, at the Lark Theater, 549 Magnolia Ave., Larkspur, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.More info at kelly-yamamoto.com.
